Top clicks of 2006

The list of stories, columns and reviews that clicked with SeattlePI.com readers runs the gamut from the technical to the political, from the salacious to the stupendously unlikely, from stories about conspiracies to stories about fashion.

Fully half the pieces listed are related to high tech, particularly to Microsoft and its competitors, which may tell you something about our audience.

Links from other sites mattered. Many of the stories listed received boosts in readership from other sites like Digg, Fark and Google News. A good story travels far and fast nowadays.

A head start didn’t matter much. You might expect that being published earlier in the year would give a piece more time to be discovered and disseminated. But in fact, the most read story of the year wasn’t published until Dec. 20. Fact is, most news stories don’t have much of a long tail. The majority of readers find them within the first few days, or maybe weeks, after publication, although the rare story can keep drawing attention for years through search-engine results.